“Grief, by contrast, is a private experience, unconstrained by ritual or time. Popular wisdom will tell you that it comes in stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – and that may be true. But the Paleozoic era also came in stages – Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian – and it lasted two hundred and ninety million years.”
